It is estimated that in Britain, people spend £450 million every year on “treatments” known as complementary and alternative medicine. No, these are not drugs that taste more palatable in combination with your usual prescribed drugs, nor are they invented by small, indie pharmaceutical companies. These are therapies like herbal medicine, homeopathy, and aromatherapy – treatments that are not evidence-based, and may even cause damage. These therapies are based on pseudoscience – unfortunately not a subject you can take at Oxford – but a set of practices that appears to have a scientific basis but in reality fails substantial scientific testing.

Take the example of colonic hydrotherapy. This is when someone inserts a tube through your anus and flushes out waste material (supposedly containing toxins that build up in there forever) with water. Some “therapists” even use water with herbal infusions in the mix. Think chamomile tea poured into your arse… Feeling healthier yet? Whilst the basis for it seems on face value scientifically sound, there is no way this will become a staple procedure done by doctors in A&E. Princess Diana once attributed her glowing complexion to colonic hydrotherapy, but why we don’t use this therapy to help people remove their heads out of their own backsides, I will never know.

Some are seemingly and beguilingly more innocuous, however. Hopi ear candling isn’t so much of a pain in the arse so much as a pyromaniac’s dream alternative therapy. In ear candling, the patient (read: rich victim) lies on their side and a hollow candle is placed over their ear and is lit. The theory goes that the flame melts the earwax and then draws it out of the ear through a negative pressure or vacuum effect. Toxins are also supposedly drawn out. It all sounds very risk-free until you find that there are cases of patients having burnt eardrums from the wax and with some patients having burnt their houses down because of DIY ear candling.

And if you think you can survive having your guts washed out or your eardrums burnt, how about drinking your own urine? This practice has been around for hundreds of years. Even Catullus writes in a poem about urine therapy being used for tooth whitening. In some Hindu texts, urine is cited as a cancer therapy. Hundreds of years later, we find public figures like Madonna talking about urinating on her feet to prevent or treat Athlete’s foot. Even J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher of the Rye, was said to have drunk his own urine. Whether this promotes existential crises as a side effect is currently the subject of much debate.

Would you ever have an alternative therapy to treat an illness? Let us know on bangscience.org

Blood. You have five litres of the stuff flowing through your body. Not something you’re likely to think about – until you have no choice. Transfusions are a vital life-saving medical procedure; 25% of us will require donor blood at some point in our lives. However, there are risks associated with donor blood. Although strict screening measures exist, patient infection is possible, as is a rapidly-developing allergic reaction. Furthermore, only 4% of eligible blood donors in Britain donate, so there is always the problem of matching supply to demand. Scottish scientists have been working to bypass these concerns with a possibly creepy-sounding alternative – the development of so-called ‘artificial’ blood, developed in the lab from stem cells.

Cultured blood cells would be ideal in avoiding the caveats of donor blood. Aside from the possibility of harbouring infection, donor blood degrades rapidly in storage. Siphoning blood from a typical donor yields a mixture of cells, of varying age and condition – hardly ideal for a patient teetering on the brink of death. Synthetic blood would be more uniform. The Holy Grail is the large-scale creation of cells belonging to the O-negative universal donor blood group.

Previous proposed alternatives to synthetic blood have included artificial oxygen carrier molecules, but these proved inefficient and potentially dangerous. In response to such failures, a Glasgow team started an ambitious project in 2009, aiming to develop industrial quantities of safe human blood. The initial steps were met with success, despite technical hurdles. As leading researcher Jo Mountford puts it, scientists are currently working with “chemical soup”, endlessly tweaking their method, before eventually hoping to scale-up to generate the 2.2 million units of blood required by the NHS annually.

In 2010, the researchers revealed that they had succeeded in turning stem cells derived from spare IVF embryos into red blood cells, blood’s essential oxygen-carriers. Recently, researchers in Edinburgh were granted a licence to make blood, which can be tested in clinical trials.

Aside from the scientific elegance of this work, there have been other hurdles to deal with. Public polls reveal that people are put off by the idea of ‘fake’ blood, particularly if it doesn’t resemble the real thing. Oddly, the idea of utterly ‘alien’-looking blood was less disagreeable in surveys than something that does vaguely resemble human blood. Researchers therefore have to deal with the aesthetic side of blood development, not just the technicalities!

What do you think? Does the idea of masked researchers ‘growing’ blood in vials give you chills? Let us know on bangscience.org

Faeces have beguiled science for centuries. Still widely used in agriculture as a fertiliser, the stuff has been padded into the soil for 8,000 years. It can even be transformed into a culinary delight, as anyone who has indulged in a cup of kopi luwak will tell you; the £400-per-kilogram coffee is famous for its preparation after passing through the digestive system of a civet cat. It seems that the humble turd has many uses, but could it be coming soon to a hospital near you?

The technique called faecal transplantation has gained popularity due to several studies that assert its success. The stomach-churning therapy has mainly been indicated for cases of Clostridium difficile, a bacterial infection that leads to diarrhoea, fever, and abdominal pain. Whilst C. difficile infections can be mild, in England and Wales alone, over 1,600 people died from C. diff in 2012. But a faecal transplant to cure it?

The thought of consuming someone else’s poop may be difficult to stomach, but its nauseating nature is key to its function. The principle is that “healthy” stools can be used to recolonise the gut with beneficial bacteria, which would outcompete the C. diff bacteria. It makes scientific sense, as it is believed that antibiotics removing good bacteria may provide C. difficile with the perfect environment in which to thrive in the first place.

Dr MacConnachie from Gartnavel General Hospital in Glasgow has carried out 20 faecal transplant procedures since 2003. “Ultimately all the patients I’ve treated, bar one, has got rid of their C. difficile,” he said. This huge success rate, albeit from a small sample size, is not unheard of. A study in America reported a 90% success rate across 100 patients.

The procedure involves blending a relative’s stool sample in a household blender with some salt water, and then filtering the mixture through a coffee filter. The fluid is then poured into the stomach through a nasogastric tube, which is inserted through the nose, and passes into the stomach, where the bacteria can repoopulate the bowels.

Now if your gut reaction to that was sheer terror, then try not to crap yourself when you find out that this transplant may even be used to treat irritable bowel syndrome, diarrhoea, and constipation. The idea might be revolting to some, but for others who suffer from such illnesses, this may be a cheaper and more-effective therapy with much less side effects, aside from maybe loss of dignity. But now the question is – if a family member becomes ill with C. difficile or irritable bowel syndrome, would you give a crap?

For more medicine and science in society articles, visit bangscience.org!

Imagine a typical heavy night out, followed by the head-ringing, retching regret of the next day. What if there was the option of pleasure without the pain? This is the promise that controversial neuropharmacologist Professor David Nutt hopes to fulfil, with recent news that he has developed possible ‘alcohol substitutes’ with none of the after-effects or toxicity of alcohol itself. Naturally, this could be a boon to students. No more staggering into a tutorial hungover (or still plain drunk), as well as the reassuring sense that you are no longer hammering your body when you drink.

Prof. Nutt points out that in our health-conscious age it is surprising we prefer to largely brush off alcohol’s harmful effects. Drinking heavily causes 2.5 million deaths worldwide each year, largely through systemic organ damage, but also by increasing incidences of violent or risky behaviour. Never mind the risk, alcohol shows no signs of losing popularity, as a glance at any British city centre past 9pm ably demonstrates.

An effective substitute would mimic effects of the widespread inhibitory ‘GABA’ neurotransmitter system in the brain, thereby dampening activity and causing relaxation. Alcohol also yields increased serotonin and dopamine levels, which give a short-term pleasurable buzz but possibly result in long-term addiction. There are multiple subsystems in the brain, so an alternative could manipulate these to give equivalent pleasurable effects without causing aggression, memory loss or addiction.

So, we have a seemingly elegant solution to the problem that alcohol causes both for individuals and societies. What’s the view of Nutt himself? “I have identified five compounds… [I] need to test them to see if people find the effects as pleasurable as alcohol. The challenge is to prepare the new drink in a fashion that makes it as tasty and appealing…in the form of a cocktail, so I foresee plenty of different flavours.” There will surely be no shortage of willing volunteers for experimentation – but concerns have been raised, not least that the professor could be tactically chasing headlines to gain funding.

A key point is that providing a ‘harmless’ alternative to alcohol, quickly reversed by an antidote, is a simplistic solution to our bingeing problem. “We should focus on what is going wrong in our drinking culture rather than swapping potentially one addictive substance for another.” So suggests Emily Robinson of the charity Alcohol Concern.

The next few years could prove fruitful for Prof. Nutt’s research (and our livers), but it’s safe to say that the alcohol industry’s input will be another matter altogether…

Does this appeal, or is fake booze a cop-out? Visit www.bangscience.org for related features.